Entry tags:
MCU meme
Stole this from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
muccamukk.
Bold = Watched Entirety
Italic = Watched Part
* Watched more than once.
† Watched in the first few weeks of release (at least initially, for TV shows).
Phase One:
* Iron Man (2008)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
* Iron Man 2 (2010)
* Thor (2011)
* Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
*† The Avengers (2012)
Phase Two:
*† Iron Man 3 (2013)
† Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV 2013–2020)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
*† Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
*† Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
† Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
*† Ant-Man (2015)
† Daredevil (TV 2015–2018)
*† Agent Carter (TV 2015–2016)
Jessica Jones (TV 2015–2019)
Phase Three:
† Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Luke Cage (TV 2016–2018)
† Doctor Strange (2016)
*† Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
* Iron Fist (TV 2017–2018)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
* The Defenders (TV 2017)
* The Punisher (TV 2017–2019)
Inhumans (TV 2017)
Runaways (TV 2017–2019)
*† Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
* Black Panther (2018)
Cloak & Dagger (TV 2018–2019)
*† Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
† Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
*† Captain Marvel (2019)
*† Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Phase Four:
Black Widow (2021)
WandaVision (TV 2021)
* The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Eternals (2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
† Loki (TV 2021-2023)
Hawkeye (TV 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Moon Knight (TV 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Ms. Marvel (TV 2022)
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (TV 2022)
Phase Five:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
† Secret Invasion (TV 2023)
† Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
The Marvels (2023)
Echo (TV 2024)
† Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Agatha All Along (TV 2024)
Daredevil: Born Again (TV 2025-2026)
Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
Thunderbolts (2025)
Ironheart (TV 2025)
Phase Six:
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Wonder Man (TV 2025)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Vision Quest (TV 2026)
Avengers: Doomsday (2026)
Avengers: Secret Wars (2027)
I had to think about this to remember exactly what was going on with the early movies! From what I remember, I wasn't really interested enough in these to watch them in the theater until the first Avengers movie came out, and that was mostly because it was a Big Deal and I didn't want to be out of the loop. (I might have seen the first Iron Man in the theater, I'm not completely sure. I know with most of them, I got caught up in the year or so before Avengers.)
This was followed by a period of watching absolutely EVERYTHING as it came out, usually on opening weekend - though I would say it wasn't really Avengers that kicked this off, it was Iron Man 3, which I loved, but the reason why I went to see IM3 in a crowded theater on opening weekend was because of Avengers, and that set the tone. (The exception was Thor: Dark World, because I still wasn't into Thor that much yet; that didn't hit until Ragnarok.) The TV shows were where I started to slide: I watched the first season of Daredevil and but wasn't interested enough to continue with the Defenders-verse until I caught up on most of it a couple of years later (never did see the last seasons of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, though; I think they weren't out when I did my big binge, and I caught up on some of the others but not those ones, because from what I saw of the later seasons, they were a bit grim for me). Agents of SHIELD was just Too Much to keep up with. In fact most of the shows were separate enough that I kinda had them filed under "watch if I get around to it."
You can see exactly the point where the movies fell off a cliff, though, and the shows I started to watch and noped out on.
(I enjoyed most of the first season of Loki and then radioactively hated the last episode of season one. I also noped out on Secret Invasion after a couple of episodes because I love spy stuff and I love Nick Fury, but reader, it was bad.)
I still have some vague urge to go watch a few I skipped at some point (Black Widow, WandaVision, Thunderbolts) but it's more of a vague "someday" kind of thing than a strong desire.
The one total outlier in there is Spider-Man: No Way Home, because I haven't seen ANY of the other MCU Spider-Man movies - I wasn't really interested in that incarnation of Spider-Man from his introduction in Civil War; I had the movie filed under "watch it later at some point" and then fell completely out of the MCU, so that didn't happen. But I watched that one movie for the Spider-Man 2 characters, because I had enjoyed the Raimi Spider-Man incarnation of it and have never really clicked with a Spider-Man adaptation since. I did enjoy it! It was lovely to get closure with them, 20 years later! Didn't make me want to go pick up the other Tom Holland movies, though.
So interesting to think how big a thing in my life this was at one point. I remember in my big flush of MCU love, about 2012-2016 or so, how exciting it was to see the list of upcoming movies/shows and anticipate them. (I remember in about 2014, when Marvel released their tentative Phase 3/4 movie schedule until like 2024 or so, a viral post went around on Tumblr that was something like, "I don't know what I'm having for breakfast but I know what I'm doing until 2024." That aged well.) I also think I've probably seen more of these more than once than I remember seeing, because for a while, my sister was also into these and I was generally seeing them twice, once on my own and then later with her, either on DVD or in the theater if they were still playing.
Remember when we watched movies on DVD?? I used to buy these - I think I have most of them up through ... the 2014/2015 movies, probably. And GOTG2. But I think it was right around there that it became so obvious streaming was the way to go for rewatching in the future that I stopped buying them on physical media.
Oh yeah, one more minor point of interest - my original tag for these was "Avengers." I started tagging MCU when it became clear that this was going to be a lot more than just Avengers, but all my old MCU posts are tagged Avengers, and I still frequently double-tag when I think of it. (And that's why all my icons for the MCU are labeled Avengers - I started out doing it like that and kept doing it to keep them together even as it became increasingly inaccurate.)
Code if you want to do it yourself:
muccamukk.Bold = Watched Entirety
Italic = Watched Part
* Watched more than once.
† Watched in the first few weeks of release (at least initially, for TV shows).
Phase One:
* Iron Man (2008)
The Incredible Hulk (2008)
* Iron Man 2 (2010)
* Thor (2011)
* Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
*† The Avengers (2012)
Phase Two:
*† Iron Man 3 (2013)
† Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV 2013–2020)
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
*† Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
*† Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
† Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
*† Ant-Man (2015)
† Daredevil (TV 2015–2018)
*† Agent Carter (TV 2015–2016)
Jessica Jones (TV 2015–2019)
Phase Three:
† Captain America: Civil War (2016)
Luke Cage (TV 2016–2018)
† Doctor Strange (2016)
*† Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)
* Iron Fist (TV 2017–2018)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
* The Defenders (TV 2017)
* The Punisher (TV 2017–2019)
Inhumans (TV 2017)
Runaways (TV 2017–2019)
*† Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
* Black Panther (2018)
Cloak & Dagger (TV 2018–2019)
*† Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
† Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
*† Captain Marvel (2019)
*† Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
Phase Four:
Black Widow (2021)
WandaVision (TV 2021)
* The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV 2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Eternals (2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
† Loki (TV 2021-2023)
Hawkeye (TV 2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Moon Knight (TV 2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Ms. Marvel (TV 2022)
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (TV 2022)
Phase Five:
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
† Secret Invasion (TV 2023)
† Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
The Marvels (2023)
Echo (TV 2024)
† Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Agatha All Along (TV 2024)
Daredevil: Born Again (TV 2025-2026)
Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
Thunderbolts (2025)
Ironheart (TV 2025)
Phase Six:
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Wonder Man (TV 2025)
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Vision Quest (TV 2026)
Avengers: Doomsday (2026)
Avengers: Secret Wars (2027)
I had to think about this to remember exactly what was going on with the early movies! From what I remember, I wasn't really interested enough in these to watch them in the theater until the first Avengers movie came out, and that was mostly because it was a Big Deal and I didn't want to be out of the loop. (I might have seen the first Iron Man in the theater, I'm not completely sure. I know with most of them, I got caught up in the year or so before Avengers.)
This was followed by a period of watching absolutely EVERYTHING as it came out, usually on opening weekend - though I would say it wasn't really Avengers that kicked this off, it was Iron Man 3, which I loved, but the reason why I went to see IM3 in a crowded theater on opening weekend was because of Avengers, and that set the tone. (The exception was Thor: Dark World, because I still wasn't into Thor that much yet; that didn't hit until Ragnarok.) The TV shows were where I started to slide: I watched the first season of Daredevil and but wasn't interested enough to continue with the Defenders-verse until I caught up on most of it a couple of years later (never did see the last seasons of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, though; I think they weren't out when I did my big binge, and I caught up on some of the others but not those ones, because from what I saw of the later seasons, they were a bit grim for me). Agents of SHIELD was just Too Much to keep up with. In fact most of the shows were separate enough that I kinda had them filed under "watch if I get around to it."
You can see exactly the point where the movies fell off a cliff, though, and the shows I started to watch and noped out on.
(I enjoyed most of the first season of Loki and then radioactively hated the last episode of season one. I also noped out on Secret Invasion after a couple of episodes because I love spy stuff and I love Nick Fury, but reader, it was bad.)
I still have some vague urge to go watch a few I skipped at some point (Black Widow, WandaVision, Thunderbolts) but it's more of a vague "someday" kind of thing than a strong desire.
The one total outlier in there is Spider-Man: No Way Home, because I haven't seen ANY of the other MCU Spider-Man movies - I wasn't really interested in that incarnation of Spider-Man from his introduction in Civil War; I had the movie filed under "watch it later at some point" and then fell completely out of the MCU, so that didn't happen. But I watched that one movie for the Spider-Man 2 characters, because I had enjoyed the Raimi Spider-Man incarnation of it and have never really clicked with a Spider-Man adaptation since. I did enjoy it! It was lovely to get closure with them, 20 years later! Didn't make me want to go pick up the other Tom Holland movies, though.
So interesting to think how big a thing in my life this was at one point. I remember in my big flush of MCU love, about 2012-2016 or so, how exciting it was to see the list of upcoming movies/shows and anticipate them. (I remember in about 2014, when Marvel released their tentative Phase 3/4 movie schedule until like 2024 or so, a viral post went around on Tumblr that was something like, "I don't know what I'm having for breakfast but I know what I'm doing until 2024." That aged well.) I also think I've probably seen more of these more than once than I remember seeing, because for a while, my sister was also into these and I was generally seeing them twice, once on my own and then later with her, either on DVD or in the theater if they were still playing.
Remember when we watched movies on DVD?? I used to buy these - I think I have most of them up through ... the 2014/2015 movies, probably. And GOTG2. But I think it was right around there that it became so obvious streaming was the way to go for rewatching in the future that I stopped buying them on physical media.
Oh yeah, one more minor point of interest - my original tag for these was "Avengers." I started tagging MCU when it became clear that this was going to be a lot more than just Avengers, but all my old MCU posts are tagged Avengers, and I still frequently double-tag when I think of it. (And that's why all my icons for the MCU are labeled Avengers - I started out doing it like that and kept doing it to keep them together even as it became increasingly inaccurate.)
Code if you want to do it yourself:
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I used to plan my vacations around these things coming out! Not so much anymore.
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(And thanks for setting up the meme - you made it, right? It'll be interesting to see how far it spreads!)
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I'm actually currently rewatching F4 on a cam version, and enjoying feeling a bit fannish about it. Not something that's hit me for a few years now, though we'll see if it goes anywhere.
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Edit: Also, it is one of the ones I plan to watch eventually; I've heard enough good things about it to be intrigued! I don't know how likely I am to see it before it comes out streaming, though.
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Haha I think you and I have talked about this, but SAME. The last episode made me hate the whole season (plus some of the earlier worldbuilding implications finally sinking in).
LOL I worked up a whole list in Word and then realized you had already included handy copypasteable code...
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(Oh nooooo, the extra work! I look forward to seeing your list, though!)
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I think I fell out midway through phase two but I made a point to see Black Panther. Not having a full knowledge of canon really hasn't stopped me from reading MCU fic but I am curious as to how people who are deeper in fandom reconcile with so much canon.
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What this list is making me feel is that I had a relatively tangential engagement with the MCU compared to most of my friends and the objective quantity of installments and it still felt like this inescapable cultural juggernaut that at some point I just noped out of. I saw almost all of the Phase One movies and almost all of them in theaters—Thor was DVD-only and for some reason I just never got around to seeing Iron Man 2. (Captain America: The First Avenger remains the only one I saw in theaters and made a point of owning on DVD. I loved it so much and in hindsight it feels telling that even in 2011 I thought its structure was a little short-circuited in order to get Steve into the same layer of time as the rest of his future teammates.) By Phase Two, I was already tracking fewer properties in that I did see Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers: Age of Ultron in theaters and Agent Carter while it was airing, but I skipped all the other shows, caught Captain America: The Winter Soldier after the fact on DVD, and have still never seen Ant-Man. The only Phase Three films I saw in theaters were Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, and Ant-Man and the Wasp; I caught up with Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Thor: Ragnarok considerably after the fact and only watched Iron Fist because you made a compelling post about it that incidentally included Ward's face. Everything I heard about Infinity War and Endgame sounded even at second hand as though they had broken their own universe. I never went back for Captain Marvel which I had actively missed in theaters. Random entries since have sounded intriguing, but The Falcon and the Winter Soldier looks like my sole interaction with Phase Four and my last Marvel property to date. I am planning to see The Fantastic Four: First Steps and refuse to acknowledge its embedment in any kind of larger context at all.
[edit] Having tickyboxed all of that out, of course, the numbers don't change the fact that the Marvel properties I had feelings about, I had enormous feelings about, and all of them still inhabit some reasonable space in my brain that can be sparked back to active discussion at the drop of a relevant object. They feel like more discrete canons, though. The media-spanning intertext is not something I want to have to care about at all.
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Inescapable cultural juggernaut is definitely the shape of it. I don't think it's possible to entirely fail to have opinions on the MCU no matter how much or how little of it you've seen. But I do think a lot of your viewing overlaps with mine quite a bit, even though I went more all-in on the general superhero movies until they got to be too much.
They feel like more discrete canons, though. The media-spanning intertext is not something I want to have to care about at all.
Yeah, I think that's how it's come to work for me over time. I enjoyed the interconnectedness early on, but it's come to matter to me less and less. When I revisit the parts that I liked - Agent Carter, Captain Marvel, whatever it is - I don't think of it in terms of the whole universe, I just think about the parts of it that matter to me.
Now that I think about it, I guess this is similar to how I find myself, in hindsight, cordoning off the parts of a canon that I didn't like - the bad ending, the disappointing subplot, the one really terrible book in an otherwise rewarding series - from the parts I did like, and only tend to revisit the favorite parts unless I'm intentionally doing a full-series reread or rewatch.
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I'll do this meme myself just to gape at how many I've seen myself, but: Similar to you, overall. I was big into it for a while then just fell out when it got too much and too many things were Not Good. I'm sure there's stuff in the newer ones that I'd enjoy, but it's now WAY too much work to catch up.
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That might be unfair of me. On the one hand, I loved the idea of giving Sam his own movie that was really focused on Black character and not "broken white boys" (thank you for that phrase, Shuri!), and I was all set to see it in theaters. On the other hand, once it was out, I heard so many bad things that I changed my mind and haven't seen it yet (I do mean to watch on tv). On the gripping hand—those were My Boys for a time, and I miss seeing them together. I'm mainly a Gen girl, and I loved gen fics about them. But I could also get into a lot of slash about the two of them, frankly.
It feels like the longer the plan goes, the more I fall out of love with characters. I loved Wanda. I think WandaVision is well worth watching, but I'm not happy with what they did with her there, and I hate what they did with her after. I watched s1 of Loki—I'd shocked myself by falling for Loki in Infinity War!), but I didn't like the s1 finale and so haven't watched s2, and it sounds like I should keep going that way. I loved Bucky, but Thunderbolts left me cold.
I still love Sam, so maybe I shouldn't watch his latest movie?
Oh, the travails of Marvel fans!
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YEAH, THAT. I think this is one of the biggest MCU problems for me in the post-Avengers era - they just never leave a cast of characters together long enough to really gel as a group. All of my core fandom feelings about the MCU had to do with particular casts of characters that got to grow over time - the GOTG gang, Team Cap, Sam & Bucky, etc. Now the MCU is all about pairing the characters in different ways, and they're not really nurturing the different casts like they did with the early movies where you'd get 2-3 movies with the same characters to watch them grow and develop feelings for them. And even if you do develop feelings for them over the course of one movie - too bad! They'll probably never interact again.
Of course it's not the only problem, because they can also do infuriatingly stupid retcons, kill off characters pointlessly or have them act wildly OOC, etc. I agree that it's gotten to the point where I like Sam too much to want to watch his new movie, which is just sad.
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Which reminds me how I hate that they killed Gamora and then introduced an alternate one. I believe I'm one GOTG movie behind because of that (but it could be more? I can't count?).
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I did make a point of seeing Black Widow in theaters, though. It was fun but not enough that I'd recommend pushing it higher on your to-watch list than "someday."
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You know, maybe I'll see the next MCU movie just so I can discuss it with my students this year and see if I can get some clarity on if they're watching/how much MCU they're watching. They're just a couple years older than the MCU at this point (scary thought!) so possibly they started watching as children and have just kept up all along...
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Related to a different discussion I was having with someone else about Gen Z and media, I guess it's possible they're "catching up" by watching clips/reviews/walkthroughs on video and don't feel like they actually need to see the other movies. (Which astonished me, until I realized I used to do the same thing with online summaries, spoilers, and scripts for shows and movies that were unavailable to me back in the 90s. The more things change, etc ...)